The Pelican's Bequest 2 / Chapter 35: Art and Artistry
We are walking through some shops the next day, debating over possible presents for Albus, and I can see him peering over his glasses at my father's face.
"If you don't stop that I'm going to turn into Aunt Adele and you'll have to live with that face just on the other side of your spectacles for the next several years."
"Don't! She's scary," Harry says. Then he looks thoughtful. "You can be a girl? Would you want to?"
"Do you want me to?" I ask, surprised.
"No! Please don't. That's too strange for me. Promise me you never will," he begs.
"I reserve the right to turn into anything if it will help me get away from an angry mob," I say dryly, ashamed to admit I've thought quite a bit about the possibility of a mob getaway. "But I won't short of that."
He's looking at me strangely. "You can really be anyone?"
A look comes across Harry's face that chills me to the marrow. He's looking at me from the point of view of his perversions—how he can shape me into them, things otherwise forbidden he might be able to get away with using my new transfiguration power.
It's like I'm looking at Voldemort in a sunny market in the South of France.
We walk around and I let Harry buy Albus whatever he wants—a small watercolor from a street artist and a box of bonbons. Smoothly I mention, "By the way, I have some potions contacts to meet in Wizarding Paris. These are some low-lifes from the wrong side of the tracks, magically speaking. I think we might want to keep my reputation as a lone wolf in that world."
Harry is about to protest. "These chaps might think they could get a price for the hide of the Boy Who Lived," I add, not entirely in jest.
He shivers. "Fine, I want to wander around. Maybe email Hermione and Ron."
We've agreed that he is to be vague as to his whereabouts but stay in contact with people to prove he's all right. Albus and I are both concerned that Harry has withdrawn so much from his friends.
In my Severus Snape form I apparate to Paris and the rogue's gallery that is The Corsair, a place where drink and contraband from around the globe can be had at all hours.
The people are very much the same as always, variations on eternal types: one has a pet sloth he carries on his shoulder as a familiar. Another has the irksome habit of switching faces every five minutes because he's constantly on the run from the law or doing something he doesn't want to be remembered for. There are dealers in rare intoxicants and magical artifacts. Conjurers like my grandmother who can make anything for a price. And then there are potions experts like myself. Come to buy, come to sell.
The fact that I am now "The Alkahest" is treated as if it is a marketing ploy to increase my infamy and thus my fee, the way Francois in the far corner was for a time called "The Necromancer" as a way to excuse his access to shipwrecks and the heirlooms of the dead that were actually acquired by different black magics.
Though I scarcely receive any direct looks at all, I am thoroughly looked over from head to toe within 30 seconds of walking through the door. All of my new power aside, they could each kill me in six different ways without batting an eyelash.
The fact that these scoundrels are just like old times makes me want to kiss each scabby man as the only things constant from my old life.
We haggle for form's sake and I make a show of checking to see if my drink is poisoned because they don't need to know that the superior quality of my potions is due to my gift—otherwise they might try to cut off my hand to see how far they could get with it. They all agree to move some of the more legally questionable compounds I can prepare, and the payment I ask for from many of them is in kind.
They say they'll try to find the rare ingredients I need and we part ways, me with a rare spring in my step. Someone throws a dagger at my back and I turn it to water before it hits my shield.
It's good to have people you can count on.
When I return to Antibes later that night, Harry is nervous. "I'm sorry, Sev, I didn't mean to upset you about saying you were going to be a girl," he says. "I'm glad you're a boy. I like boys. I've always liked boys."
The perennial question of whether or not this is true, or merely more conditioning from Voldemort, is handily pushed back down to the depths of my mind.
"When I started seeing my Aunt Adele as my reflection when I was 15, you can imagine that questions arose." It seems safer to avoid the true reasons for my upset. "I have a present for you."
A shadow of lust flicks across his face. He's expecting some BDSM treat. I smile neutrally and hand him the package.
His face clears up into a child's expression of wonder. "I've never used one," he breathes. "This is like what they use for the Prophet?"
We sit together on the bed with our legs pressing against each other as we set up the wizard camera. It's a smaller model—so new it's nearly impossible to get anywhere but on the black market, which is where I got it—meant to be less conspicuous among the muggles.
He's excited about taking pictures of us in France (or him and my father in France, unfortunately) but I know it means more than that. People who own cameras have a life narrative; they have other people to show it to. A camera is by itself a perfect anchor for a rootless life.
Then I notice my clothes being pulled off. "Let's take a picture of us, you know."
Par le Trismégiste! I never thought of that! "You will not take any pictures of me naked," I snarl, jerking away. "Or I mark my words, Harry Potter, I will leave you and never come back. I'll take off all your little fetishes and you'll have to do without. Do you want the Daily Prophet to have proof I'm a degenerate? Do you want to give them an excuse to exile me somewhere horrible? We'll never know peace on this earth if you don't learn some restraint!"
I'm yelling at him and he's looking frightened. "I'm sorry Sev, don't leave me, whatever you do."
We go out and take pictures of the sidewalk cafes near sunset, with all the French motorcars going by.
Harry and I spend the next days falling in love—him with France and me with this artist I never knew dwelled within him. There is so much I didn't learn about him up until the age of 18, and now there are so many more facets left to discover. I never knew he was artistic. His parents weren't. But then, Hogwarts doesn't emphasize the arts, magical or otherwise. And Harry was a very, very preoccupied boy.
As an adult, it's not that he's had no interest, but years of depression have layered over his ability to enjoy things, to have enough faith in himself to try.
The camera in his hand steadies Harry's gaze. He begins stopping us at the oddest times during our explorations in France. He photographs a child's paper hat left on a bench.
"Why are you photographing trash?" my literal mind asks him.
"Shut up."
Gradually I begin to see that he combines ordinary things in new ways, not because they have to be, but because they could be, because they happened to be.
For the first time he complains about my having to go about transfigured. "I want to take photographs of what I see, and I see you," he wheedles with these new persuasive skills he's discovering.
"Our future together depends on this new identity."
"What if you un-transfigured just a piece of you?" he asks suddenly.
"What, no, I—" My rejection is automatic, and then I stop to think. "Actually, there's really no harm as long as you're not obviously carrying around pictures of the Alkahest."
Beaming, Harry gets to work finding exactly the right tableau. He finds a bright patch of sun in a deserted square on a day when everyone else is indoors, and poses me in my true form in a bright patch of sun. The resulting silhouette will be easily discernible to him as my own, but to anyone else will be a dark splotch.
Our new game is for Harry to find ways to disguise me in an effort to put me in each picture somehow, my cuff, or something that reminds him of me.
He assembles from our dinner table:
A salt cellar
A glass and a bottle of an unpronounceable apertif
And just my hand put back to its normal form lying on the table half in the shadow of a bottle
He pulls me by the hand around the city we have already gotten to know, that last bit of hard reserve gone this time. "Don't dawdle, Sev, I have to find a way to capture your face relaxed in the wind here, like you never are in England."
And, unlikely model that I am, I let him move me and set me as suits his fancy. My own mind is capturing his face: what he's like far from the torture chamber.
And in my own private time when he's off sketching, I write my pedestrian notes towards a research proposal and then venture out of my normal style to write, "I want to capture the new you that you became without me, sadly, happily. The one that cared enough to save me from putting rocks in my pockets. The one who —" But it's too big. It makes me want to laugh that breathy laugh before the inexpressible, thinking about what Harry has given to me in this short time.
The camera is a modern design that allows you to preview the pictures before going through the expensive process of printing them. We get tired of snatching the device back and forth after a long day, and so I try to create a projector.
"Can I borrow your spectacles, Harry?'
It takes some magic and all that I can remember of magical optics, but a projection of the wizard photos appears on the wall.
"That's brilliant, Sev," Harry exclaims. "Which picture is it?"
A quick trip to a druggist has me back with several nonprescription reading glasses that work just as well—all I need is any sort of lens to get me started. After an hour's experimentation a large version of what is trapped in the camera is depicted on the wall of our hotel room.
We watch everything we've experienced together and it's proof that it happened, proof that we're happening. It's a code that only we can understand. Our own language made of a chipped blue china dish with radishes, or the band of gypsies that came through town one day.
"These are beyond vacation snapshots—you could put these to some haunting music and call it a short French film, mon genie." He puts my hand to his stubbled cheek. "The colors are just right, as if for once the colors that meet the eye are the same as what they are inside."
And we end up rolling over and over in the middle of the projection streaming across the room, our skin soaking up the truth and the colors of our new life together. And when we are done, the colors seep through our quieted skin and straight into our dreams.
With the complete self-absorption common to lovers of every age, everything is our backdrop.
We're grateful for the way everything is falling away from us, that this time is gentle and ignorant for a change.
We study each other, the new and the old, the real and the false, all mixing together.
Sitting on the beach under our gaily striped umbrella with Harry's browned legs sprawling out into the sun, I feel utterly content. He's started sketching around me, and I try not to stare at the strokes that spring from his hand as flawlessly as his mother's hand caught daggers in midair.
Harry's art makes me want to try and respond to it or at least reflect what I find in it, I but I'm a hopeless philistine.
"Your pictures are like Scrying Salt, mon chou: they can make the inner qualities of things reveal themselves even to those of us who lack creativity."
"Are all your metaphors potion-related?" He laughs. "If you were to try and write me a love poem, would it go something like, 'You are a like a salutary mixture of a metallic decoction and with an active distillation in the alembic of my bosom?'"
My cheeks flame. Just because I can neither draw, dance, nor produce any other art doesn't mean I'm incapable of artistry.
"So you do not find me sufficiently imaginative, Mr. Potter. Perhaps I should remind you that I do possess an absolute genius for insults, put-downs, sarcastic rejoinders, and off-hand comments that make you feel small. It seems to be a family trait and I bear it with pride." As always, it feels kind of nice to let out my inner bastard.
"Perhaps I should remind you, Mr. Snape, that I have had four years in hell to assimilate your lessons in acrimony, and I just may have surpassed my teacher in the venom department," says yet another new Harry, one who has a much larger vocabulary and a very much larger store of bitterness than the one I used to know.
"A few university classes pale in comparison to more than twenty years' worth of darkness, Potter."
"Your problem, Snape, is that you mistake quantity for quality."
"Don't be so cocky: quantity is fine and dandy but it can be replaced," I huff, turning away from the swim-trunked figure I know well.
"Sometimes you're the most frightful bitch, Severus."
"Right there we see the mark of an amateur. Sinking to the level of the epithet is an admission of defeat."
"You're just an old prude. You declare your age, slut, cunt, whore."
My color is starting to spread angrily across my face.
"I am as Incongruent as they come, my dear. There isn't a prudish bone left in my body. Those that might have once been there have all been replaced."
"Is that so? Then let's have a wager."
"What is at stake?" I ask, suspicious.
"The loser has to—" He whispers something impossible to repeat.
"Par le Trismégiste! I will do no such thing!" What has he been getting up to these four years?
"So you admit you will lose," he grins.
"Of course I won't. I've been holding myself back, you dictionary dilettante. You probably have notes in your pocket to help you remember the grown-up words."
"You might benefit from the same—it might keep you from mixing words in from other languages. And sometimes you do that thing with your neck like when you're talking to birds."
My hands clutch my neck in horror. "No! I thought I stopped shifting languages like that in childhood!"
He sneers, seeing he's struck home. "You can dish it out but not take it, hypocrite. You think that just because the laws of nature don't apply to you, that you can get away with a different code of ethics as well."
He looks at my staring eyes, thinking he's gone too far. "I'm s—"
"You are the only one for me," I say, the sharp-edged wave of arousal nearly knocking me back in the sand. No one has ever been able to enjoy nastiness as much as I do.
There is no one else in the world who would find trading insults sensual, but something sizzles across our little patch of sand, something that is much blacker than the shade cast by the parasol flapping over our heads.
We spend the afternoon in the hotel.